


The Heresy of One Age

by Gileonnen



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Alternate Universe: Role Reversal, Calendrical Heresy, Gen, Long Revolutions, Mathematics, Ominous Shadows, Practical Shuos Paranoia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 16:55:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17047043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: When Shuos Jedao is tasked with devising a strategy to recapture the Fortress of Scattered Needles, he proposes a dangerous solution: to awaken the heretical General Cheris from the black cradle.





	The Heresy of One Age

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rhea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhea/gifts).



> This is an alternate universe, and changes in one place ripple out through the rest of the canon. Accordingly, I have deliberately elected to change some events, moth names, and moth commanders.

"I trust you don't need to be told why I've asked you to participate in the deliberations," said Shuos Mikodez. A sharp, delicious smell perfumed the air as he trimmed the stem of his decorative onion. At the center of the planter was a spiky violet bloom, radiant with good health. 

He was right. Jedao didn't need to be told. He was a fox among hawks, wearing fingerless gloves to show that his claws weren't like their talons; he understood the rules of the game well enough. He was to be a web piece, darning together the frayed edges of the Hexarchate with the thread of heresy. What he didn't understand was why Mikodez had called him to a personal conference, when he might more easily have pulled a few strings with Kel Command or spoken through the shifting face of a composite.

The Shuos never played only one game when they could be playing six. Jedao quickly reviewed the people who'd seen him enter: secretaries and functionaries, mostly Shuos, some probably double or triple agents. Some who had no doubt been asked to memorize his face in case they needed to rearrange it later, either at Mikodez's behest or someone else's. Some who had simply noticed him and filed away his description to add to a report.

_One Shuos seconded to the Kel, scarred at the neck. Angular. Cold-eyed. Hair just skirting the edge of regulation._

"I serve at the will of the Hexarchate," said Jedao, a neutral non-answer that he hoped couldn't be used to cast him as a partisan for the Kel or Shuos factions. Of course, giving such an answer to the Shuos Hexarch was itself a kind of political statement, but one that Mikodez was bound by politesse to ignore.

"You've run out of second chances with the Kel," said Mikodez bluntly. "After certain extracurricular activities, Kel Command has recommended that you be remanded to the Shuos."

"Surely you mean 'returned.'"

"No, 'remanded' was the word they used. I understand there was talk of ether chains. Or 'a big metal box with holes in it.'" _Snip, snip_ went Mikodez's tiny trimming shears. "You're a valuable asset with the Kel. No one denies you've done excellent fieldwork. But you lack formation instinct, which makes them nervous. There was talk of reeducation."

Again, nothing Jedao didn't know. This conversation was either a performance or a pretext, and the longer it went on, the more he leaned toward the latter. There was something else that Mikodez wanted him to see here, something that would inform whatever solution Jedao proposed for this strategic competition that he was expected to attend.

"If there had been any serious talk of reeducation, I'd be under the needle right now, and we wouldn't be having this conversation," he said. "Kel Command understands my strategic expertise."

"Kel Command understands that you're a delicate instrument, but they tend to prefer their tools blunt and heavy. They'll make their peace with snapping you over their knees."

Mikodez would naturally be barred from making recommendations to Kel Command regarding matters of military strategy, even through a proxy. To do so would be to overstep even his considerable sphere of influence, potentially to endanger his life or (more importantly) his faction's stability.

But if Jedao simply happened to reach the conclusion that Mikodez wanted him to reach --

He swept the room with his eyes again. On entering, he'd already taken note of entrances and exits, probable secret entrances, weapons concealed or improvised, and the papers strewn under an array of ginger cookies on Mikodez's desk. Now, his gaze lingered on the lacquered panels of the walls, with their shell inlays of sporting carp and water lilies. Possibly a dig at Jedao over the last mission, but nothing meaningful. A little desk display of lightning glass shards chasing each other into birds and palms and bathers. Probably a message for someone else.

An antique calendar done in exquisite calligraphy, displayed among racks of weapons and cases of jewelry from a bygone age. _Yes,_ thought Jedao. _This is it. Possibly some sort of cipher?_ He skimmed the rows of numbers, committing them to memory.

"If you fail to impress Kel Command, Jedao, the Shuos will wash their hands of you," said Mikodez. "Nothing personal."

"It never is, is it."

Mikodez smiled. There was no rancor in his expression; he knew the game as well as Jedao did. After all, he'd been playing it far longer than anyone had expected him to. "It never is. Ginger cookie?"

"Thank you," said Jedao, and took one.

After he'd been dismissed, he crumbled the cookie into a flowerpot and had the signal satisfaction of watching the flowers wither and blacken. _You do like to keep your people on their toes,_ he thought, almost fondly.

When he arrived back at his quarters, he searched the calendrical archives for the dates from the calendar in Mikodez's office. The feasts, the bloody remembrances, the round of sacrifices that pinned the calendar to the social fabric of the Hexarchate. Signifiers skimmed past, a blur of ninefoxes and voidmoths and scrywolves in a hundred historically meaningful configurations.

And then, suddenly, the Liozh mirrorweb fracturing the Hexarchate into seven factions.

His breath caught. The calendar on Mikodez's wall was old enough to be nearly heretical. He had always been rubbish at mathematics, but even he could see the latent threat in those careful columns of numbers: a seventh power, never entirely unwoven from the six that had overwhelmed it, waiting in abeyance for centuries as the days ticked on.

At last, the numbers ticked to a stop.

 _The first year of the reconstructed calendar,_ the viewscreen said in shining letters. The first remembrance: the harrowing of the Cherisi Heretics.

Jedao swallowed. He knew what he had to do.

* * *

Kel Command's communal voice buzzed in his ears: " _Propose a means of unseating a heretical occupation of the Fortress of Scattered Needles._ " The fortress's defenses were laid out in a side panel, but none of the other composites so much as glanced at it. They all knew well its defensive capabilities. They understood that the fortress was impregnable.

The other composites laid out strategies that Jedao dismissed immediately. A bombardment by three cindermoths. An infiltration of Andan and Vidona agents under the guise of a refugee ship. An untested weapon based on scans of Hafn technologies -- this last one had merit, if only because it had the potential to be formation-neutral, but even Hafn weaponry would be affected by heretical calendrical variances.

They needed a weapon that could help them to cut through heresy. For that, they needed a heretic.

Jedao glanced from signifier to signifier, Ashhawk Skyward Falling to Ashhawk Vigilant. He'd requested that his own be concealed beneath the Ashhawk Brightly Burning to preserve his anonymity, but he knew that when his turn came to speak, they would hear the Ninefox Crowned with Eyes all the same.

He felt light and clear-headed. Now that the puzzle lay before him, he saw where he fit within it. He understood why this game required a web piece, and why Mikodez had chosen him.

When he spoke, Jedao's voice was clear and calm. "I propose that we wake General Cheris from the black cradle."

* * *

Jedao woke to a lingering weariness in his limbs, as though all of his blood had thickened and chilled. Which probably meant that he had been drugged. He had a faint memory of someone telling him that he would have to be drugged. Their voice faded into a long, slow note on a flute made of glass and shell, and then a drifting sleep.

He slid his legs over the side of the bunk and nearly fell to the floor--they felt all out of proportion, as though his bones were too long and his center of gravity too high. His head rang like an empty bowl struck with a mallet. The sound of skin on fabric was painfully loud.

It was difficult to put words together, as though he was trying to form them first in Shparoi and then translate them to the high language. _I have to think,_ he told himself.

The voice in his thoughts wasn't his own.

It was a low voice, warm and clear and steely with resolve. A woman's voice--older, he thought; subtle harmonics and inflections suggested infantry command.

_Oh._

He'd assumed, somehow, that they kept her body in a big extradimensional freezer, sleeping like a voidmoth in a chrysalis as she awaited the next battle. But of course, that was ridiculous. He saw that now. The Nirai had no need for her body; it was only her mind they needed to preserve. Wasteful to expend resources on the meat. They already had as many bodies as they could ever need.

Someone chuckled grimly, in the privacy of his head. He wasn't sure whether it was her or him.

"General Cheris," he said. He kept his voice level and pleasant. "I don't believe we've been formally introduced. I'm Shuos Jedao."

"Shuos," she said. Her voice was behind his ear, beneath his skull. It itched and burned. "They usually send me Kel."

"I was seconded to the Kel. I can show you my file, if you like. If you can see it, that is. I'm sorry; I don't know what you can see," said Jedao. He looked down at his hands, but of course, that didn't help; he was only wearing a medical shift and some sort of heated robe, and there were no marks of rank or insignia on it. He scanned the room until his eyes lit on his uniform, and he slithered down from the bed and staggered over to it.

He paused in the middle of the room because his shadow wasn't his own. It was a woman's, slight but sturdy, hair in a tidy Kel bob. At the heart of that shadow was a pair of folded wings outlined in ash and cinder, shuddering restlessly as though ready to open into flame.

Sheathed wings. It had been her signifier, before she'd broken the calendar: deliberate, conservative, averse to risk. But a signifier told you little about what a person was, and nothing at all about what she might become.

Jedao made himself look away. Pulled on his uniform and gloves. Dithered for a moment over which level of formality to present, but he supposed she couldn't find fault with full dress. His uniform adjusted to suit, gold braid snaking over his shoulders and collar to show his rank. Then he found a mirror to present himself for the general's inspection.

Instead, he saw General Ajewen Cheris, a winged specter wreathed in fire. Her eyes were wells of flame; sparks danced beneath her ivory skin. She studied him with a hawk's unwavering gaze. "Jedao is a Shparoi name, isn't it?" she asked. "What's your family name?"

If she read his file, she'd see it anyway; no reason to conceal that from her. "Garach Jedao Shkan," he answered. "And you were Mwennin, and if you think you're going to find common ground this way and turn me against the Hexarchate, you drastically overestimate how much I care about being Shparoi."

The Mwennin had been hunted throughout the Heptarchate after General Cheris's heresy, with the Shuos Heptarch Khiaz leading the charge. She had obliterated them with focus and precision, until nothing remained but an ugly footnote in Shuos academy textbooks.

Someone had probably told her about it in the last few hundred years. If not, Jedao certainly didn't plan to be the one to tell her.

"A Shuos through and through," she said. "Nine eyes isn't enough to see every threat. Especially not if they're all pointed in the same direction." She leaned back and folded her arms. Jedao knew it was psychosomatic, but he felt the heat at the back of his neck ease a little as she pulled away from the mirror. "Let's start this business, then. I can understand your speech and subvocals, but I can't read your thoughts."

"Good to know."

She smiled wryly. "I doubt you'll believe me, but I'd rather not have you waste your energy guarding your thoughts if you can help it. You'll need your mind for what's coming."

"I can prepare you a briefing on the mission," said Jedao. "I'm sure they've already put together some sort of notes or diagrams or other minutiae, but--"

"I don't mean the mission," said General Cheris. "I mean what will happen to you after the mission is over. When they no longer need you to carry me like a banner."

He was expendable--but he'd always known that. It was part of being Shuos, as much as being Kel. They found a purpose for which you were the perfect tool, and they used you until you broke. "I'm their gun," he told her. "The gun doesn't get to have an opinion."

At this point, a door opened, and a handsome man in Nirai black and silver slipped through. He wore his hair long, with a smoke-grey scarf around his throat and delicate black earrings dangling from both ears. Under other circumstances, Jedao would have found the man's beauty distracting, but he was already distracted enough by having an ancient undead heretic sharing his skull.

"Hello, Jedao and Cheris," said the man pleasantly. He carried a slate and what looked like some diagnostic equipment. A technician, Jedao supposed, come to check on how his two patients were integrating. "How are you both feeling?"

"You could have fucking warned me," said Jedao.

"Would it have helped?"

"Not really, but I would have appreciated it all the same."

General Cheris was quiet as the technician put Jedao through his paces--measured his pulse and brain waves, made him walk on a treadmill to reacquaint himself with his own body, studied his pupils so closely and intently that his breath mingled with Jedao's. His pulse leapt at the proximity.

Beneath his ear came a whisper, soft as drifting ash. It vibrated at the smooth bone knob of his skull. "Look at his shadow," said General Cheris.

When the technician pulled away, Jedao glanced down at the floor. The edges of the shadow shifted and danced, as though his clothes were woven of smoke. Only when he looked closely did he realize that the shadow was made of innumerable voidmoths, scrambling over each other and shaking dusty wings.

Jedao looked up and into the technician's disarming amber eyes. It felt as though there was a lump in his throat, sharp-edged and hard to swallow. He wasn't sure what this man was, but he wasn't some lowly technician. If Jedao hadn't known better, he might have thought--

"Use that Shuos vigilance," said Cheris. Her voice was like a hand on his shoulder. "Pay attention to what isn't said."

"I can see you in there watching me, you old crashhawk," said the Nirai cheerfully. "It's like watching a vulture eye a corpse."

"That's at least half true," Cheris said.

"How is the integration? Better or worse, with a Shuos anchor rather than a Kel?"

"Less initial trauma than last time," she replied drily. "Kel Command doesn't inject them with formation instinct, when they're seconded to the Kel?"

"Doesn't take. They're not emotionally susceptible."

"That's good to hear, at least."

The slate came out; long, elegantly tapered fingers flickered over its surface. "Anything else you can add would be helpful. As you can imagine, the state of this art advances very slowly."

"Take this down, then: your extraction protocols rely on the Kel being suicide hawks. Can you really trust that a Shuos will pull the trigger on the chrysalis gun, when the time comes?"

"The Kel have to fight their formation instinct to resist you," the Nirai countered. "The Shuos, as you yourself mentioned, have no such inhibitions. And as to firing the chrysalis gun--the data suggest that we have every reason to be confident." His voice was serene, untroubled by uncertainty.

"If you wouldn't mind explaining this chrysalis gun to me," interrupted Jedao, "I'd very much like to know what you expect me to do with it."

Only later, as he was examining the manual on the chrysalis gun, did Jedao wonder why the matter was so fraught. It wasn't as though this was the first time he'd been asked to shoot someone.

 _But it might be the last,_ said a niggling little voice that was probably-but-not-definitely his. _What happens to you, when she's not in your head anymore?_ Jedao clamped down on that thought before it could lead somewhere treacherous.

He supposed it was just one more thing he didn't need to be told.

* * *

The campaign began. Jedao, who had been so close to crashing out of the Kel in chains less than a week ago, suddenly found himself wearing a brevet general's temporary braid. His swarm ( _his_ swarm! for the love of fox and hound) deferred to his orders with a pleasing swiftness, and if he detected some hesitation in his commanders, he hardly blamed them.

He hadn't earned the rank, and the actual general in his head had splintered the heptarchate for decades with her new calendar. When you were preparing to fight heretics, their leadership credentials hardly inspired confidence.

For the most part, Cheris was a quiet passenger in his head. She deferred to his judgment on his staff, although she showed a keen awareness of posture and inflection when she did offer an assessment. "Commander Esjain would prefer a greater reliance on scouts over scans," she said beneath his ear as he met with his command team. "They don't trust instruments in calendrically unstable space."

"If they want scouts, they can request them," Jedao answered through subvocals.

"A commander doesn't make requests of a general," Cheris answered. "Their formation instinct is keyed to you now. They'd throw themselves into the blast radius of a threshold winnower if you asked them to."

It was true, little as Jedao liked to hear it. And he couldn't ask for advice or suggestions without distressing his Kel more. They needed to see him faultless, doubtless--a fixed point by which they could navigate.

Fortunately, the Shuos had taught him how to pretend to be someone he wasn't.

While Jedao slept, Cheris calculated the calendrical rot setting in around the Fortress of Scattered Needles. She requested the data feeds on one screen, the data growing ever more precise and accurate as their swarm drew closer to the fortress. He woke to screens covered in equations and graphs, charting vectors that he could tell intuitively meant _something_ even if he couldn't make ears or tails of the math behind it. He watched as curves intersected, spun out into waves, climbed suddenly toward infinity in every direction, and it was like watching voidmoths transiting through atmosphere. They left stars shivering in their wake.

"What are you trying to solve, exactly?" he asked as the numbers rearranged themselves again. She was using his augment, which felt strange and ticklish. "I'm sure these numbers mean something very important, but how does this help us to take the fortress?"

"They put me in the black cradle to solve problems like this one," Cheris said patiently. "You're the strategist. When I have my answers, you'll know what to do with them. Could you see if any servitors are available to help? I'd appreciate the company."

That was another thing about Cheris--she always thanked the servitors when they brought meals or lent their processing power, and she chatted with them in tapping Machine Universal about their work and their days. _A spy network,_ Jedao thought at first, and he saw some utility in that; servitors went everywhere unnoticed. But as the days wore on, he began to believe that she had no ulterior motive. She simply enjoyed the company of servitors and thought of them as people.

That left him with the unpleasant task of coming up with a way of cracking the fortress's defenses. He didn't think of himself as a strategist, whatever Cheris had called him and whatever his profile showed. His aptitude for game mechanics had been noted early on in his time in the academy, and he had a knack for the small-scale logistical puzzles that the Shuos and Kel occasionally set for him. That was all. Infantry, small swarms--never anything bigger than a team of bannermoths. Never against a target as massive or well-defended as the Fortress of Scattered Needles.

He'd assumed that Mikodez wanted Cheris because she would know how to take down the fortress. It had never occurred to him that this task would be left entirely in his hands.

Reports came in. The calendrical rot was more advanced than anyone had let on; either Kel Command hadn't known, or they hadn't seen fit to pass that information down. A settlement in the Crescent of Shearing Ice had missed remembrances, destabilizing the region further. Doctrine assured him that a team of Vidona were rectifying the problem, but his exotics would be unreliable until the settlement could be brought to heel.

He couldn't let himself dwell on what that meant. "Drill on invariant weapons, then," he ordered. "Scan, if we can find some live targets, I imagine Commander Esjain is eager to demonstrate their swarm's skill at maneuvering."

He caught a glimpse of his reflection in a bulkhead. Cheris's fiery eyes watched him until he turned away.

Closer still to the fortress, into the Entangled March. They bannered General Cheris's Book of Doors, since Jedao had never had a banner of his own. Their swarm crossed paths with heretic scoutmoths armed with fungal canisters and ugly new exotics that speared two of Commander Kiwala's boxmoths full of light. Then the swarm moved on, leaving moth hulls shredded and luminous behind them.

"Remind them that it was a victory," said Cheris. "They need someone to tell them that." Her voice was very level and calm.

It was hard to stick to subvocals when he'd just heard the reports from the scouts who'd gone to inspect the casualties. "You're not going to chastise me about those Kel who died out there? The fungus blooming out of their skin? The light cutting them to pieces? That seems like the kind of thing you'd be angry about."

"I was a Kel before I was a heretic," she said. "I chose to be a soldier. I know soldiers die."

 _But they didn't choose, exactly._ He didn't say it. She knew he was thinking it, because she'd made sure he was thinking it.

He congratulated his swarm, and he tried to sound sincere about it.

When they eased into position at the Fortress of Scattered Needles, Jedao had finally devised a plan, and Cheris had solved whatever equation she'd been unraveling.

"Their calendar is unstable," she said.

"If you've just spent several nights doing high-level mathematics to tell me what we heard in the briefing--"

"I don't mean it's at variance with the high calendar," she said impatiently. "I mean it's not fixed. There's a guiding mind behind it--the intervals make numerical sense--but the pattern of signifiers is constantly changing. It's as though they're deciding how the calendar will proceed in real time. My best guess is that each day's and even each hour's signifier is democratically selected. It's a perfect counter to exotic weapons because the pattern can't easily be extrapolated or mathematically adjusted for."

"And it's even more difficult to manipulate." Jedao studied Cheris's face in his reflection. Her expression was Kel-neutral, but there was a slight shift to her body language that he was beginning to think meant she was holding something back. "What else did you find?"

"The intervals are in sevens," she said. "I think we may be dealing with a reconstructed Heptarch."

Jedao followed her line of thinking immediately. Someone was posing as Liozh. A moral guide, an ethical center for a people in revolt. No wonder democracy was their heresy of choice. It meant everyone was responsible for what they did, which in turn meant that no one was responsible.

Jedao sighed. "Well, fuck. This changes my plans."

* * *

The cindermoth _String of Pearls_ hailed the Fortress of Scattered Needles, bannering the Book of Doors. Jedao flexed his hands in his fingerless gloves and tried not to think about what he was about to do.

The six wards of the fortress craved guidance. They wanted to be told what was right. They wanted to believe that their choices mattered, and they were willing to tear apart the old calendar and everyone who relied on it in order to keep believing it.

For that, he could do them one better than a Liozh.

"To the Fortress of Scattered Needles, this is General Ajewen Cheris," she said through his mouth. "You know my heresies. I remade the Heptarchate calendar so that we could choose how it affected us. I believed--" and for just a moment, he felt his voice on the edge of cracking "--that we should be allowed to choose."

An enormous, echoing ache filled him. He felt tired down to his bones. It seemed like such a small thing to want. Such a small, impossible thing.

"Your calendar in its current form will fragment and decay. All of the systems it supports will need to be individually maintained, but no matter how much you fight for them, they'll decay, too. I know because I saw it happen on the borders of the Heptarchate. I was there. I can name systems and dates. I watched them collapse. Those who fled were cut down, the way this swarm is waiting to cut you down."

A flicker across the surface of the invariant ice that shielded the fortress. Someone's hand at the controls, adjusting just slightly. Frequencies shifting and dancing.

"I can calculate a stable calendar at variance with the high calendar," said Cheris. "I'm willing to transmit my notes as a gesture of goodwill. Let me help you."

Behind Jedao, the woman in Doctrine tensed. He could hear her hands tightening on her station.

His fingertips brushed the chrysalis gun. _If she appears to be dangerous, or promotes heresies ... could I pull the trigger? I've killed so many people that their faces blur together; why would I hesitate to shoot one more heretic?_

_Is she really wrong?_

Then there came an enormous ear-shattering hum, and the fortress fired. The invariant missile spiraled through space, just barely missing the tip of a cindermoth's wing.

The woman at Doctrine relaxed. Jedao's hand fell from the gun.

 _It's easier this way,_ he told himself. _Easier if I can treat them like enemies. Test formations against their invariant ice, deploy propaganda agents to push Cheris as an alternative to their Liozh, break their will and then their defenses._

But when he looked down at his reflection in the display, he saw Cheris watching him, and he wondered what he would have done if they'd said _Yes._


End file.
